FSFE Newsletter - August 2013

Proprietary companies ask European Commission to restrict business models

Because Android is Free Software and gratis, the non-free software
competition cannot compete with it, therefore the market has less alternatives,
thus the consumer suffers from this lack of competition. In a nutshell that is
the argumentation of the so-called "Fair Search" coalition. Essentially they
are asking the European Commission to favour a restrictive business model over
a liberal one, which is exactly the opposite of what competition regulators
should do in order to achieve a fair market.

Election software: source code available but not Free Software

Estonia has used Internet voting for general elections since 2005. Local
activists have recently managed to convince Estonia's National Electoral Committee (NEC) to release source code for
some of the software under a non-free licence, but this licence does not permit
distribution of derivative works or commercial use and therefore is non-free.
Besides "[i]mportant system components remain completely unknown to the general
public. One of those components is the client side voting application that must
be loaded and executed on the voter's computer," said Heiki Ojasild, Fellowship
representative in the FSFE's General Assembly in our press release accompanying
our open letter to
NEC regarding the country's Internet
voting system.

Similar in Norway: Paul Boddie reports about the Norwegian voting and the
illusion of "Open Source", where the published software covers only
"testing, reviewing or evaluating the code", restricts commercial purposes, and
for a lot of things you need a "written approval" from the vendors.

NSA leaks motivates Free Software activists

For almost two decades the Free Software Foundations have been working for a
society where the power over technology is distributed. We work
for a world in which nobody can prevent others from learning how computers
work. A world in which programmers can work with each other instead against
each other. Nobody should be forced to use a certain kind of software without
being able to adjust it to her own needs instead of adjusting herself to the
software. Everybody should be able to audit software, to understand what a
program does exactly and what happens to your data.

The Free Software movement wrote a lot of software which respects your
privacy, including encryption and anonymisation software. The FSFE pushed for
Open Standards to prevent monopolies by enabling different software to work
with each other. We promote decentralised systems, so there is no single point
in our infrastructure which has too much power and which enables you to store
the data in a trusted enviroment.

It seems the NSA leaks of the last weeks have strengthened the Free Software
community's will to continue fighting for our freedoms in a digital society.
More people are listening to Free Software programmers and activists, more
people demand Free Software solutions, more people are using Free Software to
protect their privacy, and more people appreciate Free Software developer's
work. E.g. Eva Galperin from EFF
said in her keynote at KDE's conference akademy: "Help us Free Software,
you are our last and only hope". She asked Free Software developers to build
new products, and "save us"! And as you will see below, the Free Software
movement will continue to do so.

A proposal for a new encrypted mobile messaging app called Hemlis
received $125,000 in crowdfunding. It is good to see ambitious new software
projects get support from the community when they are Free Software. Sam
Tuke checks if this is
really the case with Hemlis.

Should a person be bound by terms of use and contracts where that
person has been effectively coerced into accepting them? Other
questions about IT in universities are asked by Paul Boddie in "Students: Beware of the
Academic Cloud!"

In the Free Software community a lot of us understand how end-to-end
encryption works. At the moment a lot of people new to Free Software want to
use it themselves. If you have some time, either help some friends, colleagues,
or search for local crypto parties and show others how to use GnuPG for e-mail
encryption, OTR for encrypted chats, TOR to anonymise your online behaviour or
programs like Jitsi to have encrypted audio and video communications.